Cole stopped crawling and got ready to shoot. He would have liked to make it to one of those islands of rock and brush to find a solid rest for his rifle, plus some cover, but he was out of time. The hounds were already busy shooting.
He had to shoot now, while the sniper was distracted.
He would have preferred firing from a prone position, but the vegetation blocked his view. A sitting position was his only option. He sat Indian-style, but kept his ankles as flat to the ground as possible. He hooked the sling through his right arm to help steady the Springfield, and then put his elbows over his knees, not bone to bone because that would be unsteady, but meat to meat and sinew to sinew. He bent forward at the waist, getting right up on the scope.
From the barn, Rohde watched the American sniper with professional interest.
It was past mid-morning when Rohde had heard an American squad exchange fire with Scheider, and probably getting the worst of it. That Scheider was a good shot, damn him. He ended up pinning down the squad to the point that they bunched up on the road.
Rohde was just beginning to think that his plan wasn't going to work. The Americans were being stubborn. Instead of trying to flank Scheider, and moving into Rohde’s killing field, they were shooting it out on the road.
Again, to pass the time, he addressed his dead brother. The American strategy is always to move forward. They never think about moving sideways.
That’s when he had noticed the other sniper. A flicker of motion caught his eye. Wait. Carl, what was that?
Rohde fixed his eyes straight ahead, relaxing his focus so that his eyes would naturally detect any movement in the field. There. Quickly, his sharp eyes went to the motion. It was not the entire squad moving to flank Scheider. Just one man. One with a telescopic sight on his rifle. An American sniper, which was something of an unusual sight.
Rohde felt his heart beat faster. A sniper would be a rare prize.
Captain Fischer might even put Rohde in for a medal sooner, rather than later.
After he killed this sniper, he would go down and take his rifle. Maybe the American weapon would be better than this Stück Müll fat old Hohenfeldt had given him.
Studying the sniper through the telescopic sight, Rohde saw a lean man who moved with the stealth of an animal, belly low to the ground. The American had something painted on his helmet. It looked like a flag of some sort.
Rohde pressed his eye closer to the sight, straining to see across the distance. The flag appeared to be a red rectangle traversed by a blue St. Andrew's X-shaped cross, with stars inside the cross. It looked a bit like the flag of Norway, as a matter of fact, but Rohde was sure that he had never seen this particular flag before. What in hell? Maybe it was a unit designation of some sort. This sniper wouldn't have been the first American to decorate his helmet in some way. In much the same manner, the Americans were always drawing pictures on their tanks and planes, and giving them silly names.
Germans saw that as akin to defacing military equipment. No tank commander in the 5th Panzer would ever decorate his Tiger tank with a picture of a half-naked woman. Who would even consider such a travesty?
Rohde let the American belly crawl through the field, knowing that he could take him at any instant. That thought made him tingle down to his boots with what was almost a sexual feeling of anticipation. Strange, isn’t it, Carl, to have the power of life and death over someone without him knowing it? He watched with professional interest as the sniper got into a sitting position and aimed toward the copse of trees that hid Scheider.
It was all Rohde could do not to snort at the sniper's confidence. The American was a long way from where Scheider was hidden. Did the American really think he could shoot accurately from that distance? With a sitting stance, no less?
Cole scanned the treetops.
Down the road, bullets snicked at the tree branches hiding the German, but the sniper managed to return fire, keeping the Americans pinned down.
He glimpsed a burst of something deep in the shadows among the trees. It could have been a muzzle blast, or maybe just a sudden movement.
With a mental image locked in place of where he had spotted the movement, he fired. Worked the bolt, sending a brass .30/06 shell spinning away. Acquired the woodsy patch where he had seen a ripple of movement. Fired again.
The sniper in the woods fell silent.
As Rohde watched, the sniper fired, and the shooting in the copse of trees fell silent. To hit Scheider at such a distance, this American must be a sniper of some skill.
Rohde was more than a little impressed. Rohde was glad that he had not been the one in the enemy's sights. One shot from the American and Rohde's problem with his rival was solved.
In payment, Rohde would kill the American quickly. He lined up the sight on the back of the American's helmet. The bullet would take him square in the back of the head.
Rohde held his breath and squeezed the trigger.
Cole shifted to get a better look through the scope and in the next instant something inside his skull went whang.
He just had time to think, "Who in the hell hit me in the head with an ax handle?"
Then everything went black.
When Rohde fired, two things had happened as instantaneously as the primer igniting the powder in the cartridge. First, Rohde felt the satisfying jolt against his shoulder of the Mauser's recoil. In the same instant, the American cocked his head.
The American had gone down, but because the sniper had moved just as Rohde had fired, he couldn't tell if the bullet had struck true.
He ejected the spent shell and slapped the bolt into place. The rifle jolted out of position, and he wasted precious seconds repositioning the weapon.
Hop, hop, hop. It was like he could hear his old training instructor shouting into his ear. Hurry, hurry, hurry.
Feeling rushed and nervous, Rohde got off another shot too quickly, because it kicked up dirt near the American's head. He took a deep breath. Take it easy, he told himself. The American wasn’t moving. Maybe that first bullet had done for him.
He lined up the sight right between the sniper's shoulder blades.
Chapter Eleven
When Cole came to twenty seconds later, he found himself staring at the blue summer sky, wondering what the hell had just happened.
He knew that he’d been shot. Somehow, he was still alive. His head was ringing, but there didn’t seem to be any blood.
He tried to piece together the last few seconds before he'd been knocked out, hoping that it would give him some clue as to the shooter’s location.
Cole had been listening for the sniper in the copse to shoot again, not sure that he'd hit him. He had tilted his head to hear better.
Just at that instant, the bullet grazed his helmet. The shot had not come from the direction of the copse, but from behind him. Cole realized that if he hadn't happened to turn his head just then, the bullet would have drilled through his skull.
Much later, when he'd had time to think on it, he reckoned that maybe he had somehow heard that bullet coming for him, outrunning sound itself. His pa had always said that he'd been born with eyes in the back of his head. It was damn near the only nice thing the old man had ever had to say about him.